Returning to this thread to note that I eventually did enter the contest, and was selected as a finalist! I tried to describe a world where improved governance / decisionmaking technology puts humanity in a much better position to wisely and capably manage the safe development of aligned AI.
https://worldbuild.ai/W-0000000088/
The biggest sense in which I’m “playing on easy mode” is that in my story I make it sound like the adoption of prediction markets and other new institutions was effortless and inevitable, versus in the real world I think improved governance is achievable but is a bit of a longshot to actually happen; if it does, it will be because a lot of people really worked hard on it. But that effort and drive is the very thing I’m hoping to help inspire/motivate with my story, which I feel somehow mitigates the sin of unrealism.
Overall, I am actually suprised at how dystopian and pessimistic many of the stories are. (Unfortunately they are mostly not pessimistic about alignment; rather there are just a lot of doomer vibes about megacorps and climate crisis.) So I don’t think people went overboard in the direction of telling unrealistic tales about longshot utopias—except to the extent that many contestants don’t even realize that alignment is a scary and difficult challenge, thus the stories are in that sense overly-optimistic by default.
Returning to this thread to note that I eventually did enter the contest, and was selected as a finalist! I tried to describe a world where improved governance / decisionmaking technology puts humanity in a much better position to wisely and capably manage the safe development of aligned AI. https://worldbuild.ai/W-0000000088/
The biggest sense in which I’m “playing on easy mode” is that in my story I make it sound like the adoption of prediction markets and other new institutions was effortless and inevitable, versus in the real world I think improved governance is achievable but is a bit of a longshot to actually happen; if it does, it will be because a lot of people really worked hard on it. But that effort and drive is the very thing I’m hoping to help inspire/motivate with my story, which I feel somehow mitigates the sin of unrealism.
Overall, I am actually suprised at how dystopian and pessimistic many of the stories are. (Unfortunately they are mostly not pessimistic about alignment; rather there are just a lot of doomer vibes about megacorps and climate crisis.) So I don’t think people went overboard in the direction of telling unrealistic tales about longshot utopias—except to the extent that many contestants don’t even realize that alignment is a scary and difficult challenge, thus the stories are in that sense overly-optimistic by default.